Dead Sea Scrolls - The Torah and Jesus

Last night (July 16, 2007), we went to a lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls at the San Diego Natural History Museum. The 50-minute lecture was presented by Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, curator of the exhibition. It was certainly worth our time and provided food for thought! Here's my morning-after notes of what I learned.

In ancient Israel, the Tabernacle, and then the Temple, was built to be the dwelling place of God - or at least of God's name. The Ark of the Convenant was in the Holiest of Holies, and God dwelt between the tips of the wings of the gold cherubs on the top of the Ark. This was the place where God made his will known to the people.

The Ark disappeared, and the Temple was destroyed. Where did God go? The Temple was rebuilt, but there was no Ark. How were people to communicate with God? The second Temple was also destroyed in about 70 CE, but that was of probably lesser importance than the destruction of the first Temple because the Ark wasn't present in that second Temple. The people had already had to deal with that important question - Where was God and how did they know his will?

The Scrolls lead us to believe that the people resolved that question by believing God was now within the Torah (Jews) or, later, in Jesus (Christians). Dr. Kohn's proposal, based on the information in the scrolls, is that the new Jewish way of seeing God and the Christian way of seeing God may have evolved as twin belief systems, not as parent-sibling systems. It's an interesting way of seeing the Christian-Jewish relationship now.

One of the important things I came away with from the lecture is a new awareness of the importance of the Torah to the Jewish faith. God is present there. The sacredness of the Torah, in the Jewish faith, is equal to the sacredness of the presence of Christ in the Christian faith.